Piecework

by Pete Hamill

  In the end, of course, all education is self-education, and Tyson is clearly deep into the process. The faculty of Tyson’s university includes Cus D’Amato and Alexandre Dumas, Machiavelli and the prophet Muhammad, Dutch Schultz and Ernest Hemingway, and dozens of others. Part of the curriculum includes what some academics call life experience. There are millions of college graduates who don’t know what Tyson knows. About writers and thinkers. About life itself.

  “A lot of people get the misconception that by being free that you’re free” he says. “That’s not necessarily true. There’s people on the outside who are more in prison than I’ll ever be in here.” He chuckles. “You know, it’s human to fall. But it’s a crime to stay down and not get up after you fall. You must get up.”

  In the visitor’s lounge at the Indiana Youth Center, he smiles when a woman offers to buy him a soda. “Sorry, thank you, but I don’t drink soda.” He looks at his hands. Twenty-two months earlier, he’d come to this elaborate cage like a man knocked down. When he started school, he got to one knee. Now he’s standing up.

  “I know this,” he says. “When I get out, I’m gonna be in charge of my own life. I used to leave it to others. I’d say, ‘Hey, I’m the boss.’ But then I’d leave it to people, to Cus, to Don King, whatever. But that’s what you do when you’re a kid. You can’t do that when you’re a man.”

  I utter some banality about the dangers that might still confront him on the outside, how powerful the pull of the ghetto spirit might be when the bad guys from the neighborhood come calling on him again.

  “Well, that’s no problem anymore,” he says and laughs. “They’re all dead.”

  He turns and glances at the picture window. Fat white snowflakes are now falling from the steel-colored sky, out there in the world of highways, car washes, diners, and motels. Another prisoner’s name is called, and a black man rises and touches his woman’s face. Time is running out.

  “Sometimes I get so frustrated in here, I just want to cry,” says the fighter who once described himself as the baddest man on the planet. “But I don’t. I can’t. Because years from now, when this is long behind me, I want to know I went through it like a man. Not to impress anyone else. But to know it myself, know what I mean?”

  A departing visitor nods, recognizing Tyson, and he nods back, a look granted like an autograph. He turns to me again, his hands kneading each other, his right leg bouncing like a timepiece.

  “When you die, nothing matters but the dash,” Tyson says abruptly. “On your tombstone, it says 1933-2025, or something like that. The only thing that matters is that dash. That dash is your life. How you live is your life. And were you happy with the way you lived it.”

  A guard calls Tyson’s name now. Time is up. Tyson rises slowly. He tells me to send his best to friends in New York. He promises to stay in touch. We embrace awkwardly. He looks as if he wants to freeze the moment, freeze time itself. Then he turns and nods politely to the guard and flashes a final goodbye grin to his visitor.

  “Take care,” number 922335 says, and returns to the world of rules, to sleep another night where the snow never falls.

  ESQUIRE,

  March 1994

  MADONNA

  Of this we can be certain: Madonna is the greatest artistic force of the AIDS generation. As a sex symbol, she is all we have, but she is a lot more than that. It doesn’t matter that she can’t sing very well, that she’s an ordinary dancer, that there are many women of more refined beauty. She is the triumphant mistress of her medium: the sexual imagination. In an age when real sex can lead to horror and death, here is Madonna — reckless, bawdy, laughing and offering us all the consolation of outrageous illusions.

  In almost every version of her public self, Madonna appears as a fearless sexual adventurer, sharing sex with strangers, colliding with rough trade, risking pain or humiliation to break through to pleasure beyond all conventional frontiers. With music, dance and, above all, image, she challenges organized religion, the middle class that spawned her, political hypocrisies and what George Orwell called “the smelly little orthodoxies.” Follow me, ye weak of heart, she says. Up ahead lies the big O! Nirvana! Fearless fucking! Just roll the dice.

  What saves this performance from preposterous narcissism is a simple corrective: There’s a wink in the act. While Madonna presents her latest illusion, a hint of a smile tells us that we shouldn’t take any of it too seriously. She always hedges her bet with camp, elegant caricature and a style appropriated from the gay underworld on the eve of AIDS.

  That style was part of the exuberant rush that accompanied gay liberation, when the doors of many closets flew open and out came leather and chains and whips, every variety of mask, anonymous multiple couplings and a self-conscious insistence on sex as performance. Before she became a star, Madonna moved through that world in New York. Today she presents it as a glossy nostalgia, tempered with irony and served up to everyone from suburban teenagers to aging baby boomers. They all seem to love it.

  Without that ironic wink, of course, she would be as square as Jesse Helms. But Madonna is hip to something huge: AIDS made sexual freedom a ghastly joke. At the point where the sexual revolution had triumphed for everyone, the most ferocious sexually transmitted disease of the century arrived, wearing a death’s-head from some medieval woodcut. Every artist was forced to confront it, just as 19th century artists were hammered into dealing with syphilis. Some artistic responses to AIDS were moving and tragic; too many were runny with self-pity. But Madonna came roaring into the room in a spirit of defiance. She would not go gentle into that good night.

  But she also knew that the only completely safe sex is the sex you can imagine — that is, an illusion. If you can’t have something you desire with every atom of your flesh and blood, you must be content with a gorgeous counterfeit. That insight became the armature of her work. And she elaborated on it with a shrewd understanding of sexual psychology: The most reliable erogenous zone is the human mind, and the libido feeds on images, not ideas.

  Like Michael Jackson, Madonna vaulted to stardom with videos, a form thick with imagery that sometimes triumphs over the banality of lyrics. Jackson’s images were charged with rage, Madonna’s with frank and open carnality. But as the Eighties went on, as the graves filled with the young dead, as AIDS defied a cure, Madonna’s images became more obviously infused with a dark comic spirit. It was as if she were saying: I know this is a lie and you know this is a lie, but it’s all we have.

  This surrender to illusion is at once daring and sad. Most American performers spend their careers trying to convince us that their lies are the truth. Madonna is braver than most and more original: She says openly that her lies are lies. She asks you only to admire the form of the lies. This was itself a breakthrough for a pop artist. Until Madonna, the basic task of any performer was to persuade the audience to suspend its disbelief. Frank Sinatra or Billie Holiday wanted us to believe that their grieving lyrics and aching tones expressed the pain and hurt of the performers themselves. A millionaire such as Mick Jagger wanted us to believe he was a working-class hero or a street fighting man. But Madonna says something else. Don’t suspend your disbelief, she implies. Disbelief is the basic point.

  I went to the publication party for her book, Sex, and, like the book, the party was a celebration of the counterfeit. Scattered around Industria, the city’s hottest photo studio, were many extraliterary diversions: actresses dressed as nuns pretending to offer blasphemous pleasures; peroxide blond androids languidly flogging each other with strips of licorice; black dancers in chains and leather; writhing gym-toned bodies; many undulating bellies; much bumping and grinding. Everything, in short, except actual fucking. And that, of course, was the point: This wasn’t real and the audience knew it wasn’t real.

  Madonna’s video Erotica was playing continually, shot in the grainy black-and-white style of Forties porno films. But it wasn’t a real porno film. It was fake porno. Ah, yes: I remember Paris. The German
s wore gray and you wore nothing. Nostalgia remains the most powerful of all American emotions.

  Sex went on to become the number-one best-seller in the nation, assisted by the hype but also driven by the genius of Madonna. And that might tell us something about America.

  Books have taught us that lpve is an illusion but sex is real. For millions of Americans, that old formulation appears to have been reversed. You can experience love, but anything more than the illusion of sex is too dangerous. The possibility of death is always a marvelous corrective to human behavior. But if such an immense change is, in fact, under way, its poster girl is Madonna. Sometimes life really does imitate art.

  PLAYBOY,

  April 1993

  FOSSE

  Fosse was dead and after the urgent calls and the logistics of death, there seemed nothing really to do about it except go for a walk along Broadway in the midnight rain.

  This was the square mile of the earth Bob Fosse cared for more than any other. Up there on the second floor at 56th Street was the rehearsal hall where I’d met him years ago. Around the corner was the Carnegie Deli, where he’d have lunch with Paddy Chayefsky and Herb Gardner, trading lines, drinking coffee, smoking all those goddamned cigarettes. On the nth floor of 850 Seventh Avenue, he and Chayefsky and Gardner had their separate offices, and from Paddy’s they would often gaze in wonder across the back courtyard of the Hotel Woodward, at the man in underwear who was always shaving, no matter what the hour. A few blocks away was the building where Fosse lived the last decade of his life.

  And down the rain-drowned avenue was the sleazy hamlet I always thought of as Fosseville: all glitter and neon and dangerous shadows. This wasn’t Runyon’s fairy-tale Broadway; it was harder, meaner, as reliable in its ruthlessness as a switchblade. Yet even in his most cynical years, Fosse insisted on seeing its citizens as human, observing their felonies and betrayals not as a journalist or a sociologist but as the fine artist he was. “I see a hooker on a corner,” he said to me once, “and I can only think: there’s some kinda story there. I mean, she was once six years old….” On this late night, I could see Fosse in black shirt and trousers, standing in some grimy doorway, looking out at his lurid parish; he had been young here and almost died here and sometimes fled from the place and always came back. In Fosseville the gaudiest dreams existed side by side with the most vicious betrayals; everything was real but nothing was true. And, of course, he believed in some dark way that all could be redeemed by love.

  Nobody loved harder. He loved his wives: Mary Ann Niles, who danced with him in the last years of the nightclub era (and who died a year after Fosse), Joan McCracken, who died on him when they were both young, and Gwen Verdon, who was with him when he lay down for the final time on the grass of a small park in Washington. But Fosse wasn’t one of those men who can be married; the emotional core of his masterpiece, All That Jazz, is not so much the romantic attraction of death, but the impossibility of fidelity. There were simply too many beautiful women in this world, with their grace and style and intelligence and mystery; the demand of monogamy was like ordering a man to love only one Vermeer.

  And so he loved many women; most were dancers and actresses, because in the world where he worked they were the women he met. He treated all of them with the same grace. I saw him most often when he was between women; he was then usually engulfed by a bleakly romantic sense of loss (although the only remorse he ever expressed was about Gwen). When he met a new woman, when he was swept away, he would vanish from his usual precincts; no male friends were as important as a woman or the possibility of love.

  It was no accident that he always celebrated women in his work, although he was hardly an illustrator of feminist dogma. In the ’50s and ’60s, half the men I knew were in love with Gwen Verdon, who on stage combined humor, vulnerability, toughness, and sensuality in shows designed, choreographed, directed by Fosse. She always moved the tough guys most of all. “Every time I see her,” the sports-writer Jimmy Cannon said of Gwen, “I want to run away with her.” When Damn Yankees was in its long run, Paul Sann, the greatest newspaperman I ever knew, said of Gwen one night: “You better go see her now, kid, ’cause you ain’t gonna see anything like her again on Broadway for the rest of your fucking life.” About Gwen Verdon, as about so many things, Sann was absolutely right.

  But if it’s forever impossible to separate Fosse from Gwen, he was also a fine director of other women. Liza Minnelli, Valerie Perrine, and Anne Reinking did their best work with Fosse. He was one of the few directors to see King Kong and recognize that Jessica Lange could be a superb actress; later they would become lovers, and he would cast her as the Angel of Death in All That Jazz. It was entirely appropriate, of course, that Fosse would imagine death as a woman, thus merging his two most passionate obsessions.

  But he loved other things too: almost all forms of music; nightclub comics; cheap vaudeville jokes (Q. “Do you file your nails?” A. “No, I throw them away…”); the New York Mets; good food (he spent hours cooking in the huge kitchen of the house in Quogue, bringing his perfectionism to the details of the simplest meal); Fred Astaire (there were no pictures of himself in the Quogue house and two of Astaire); air hockey; children; New York Post headlines; boxing and football; his daughter Nicole; good wine, margaritas, and brandy; his cat, Macho, a stray discovered beaten-up and bloodied in the Quogue grasslands and nursed to plump domesticity; and, of course, those goddamned cigarettes.

  After family and lovers, he admired writers more than anyone else. Among his friends were Gardner and Chayefsky, E. L. Doctorow, Peter Maas, and Budd Schulberg. Although he liked to affect the Fm-only-a-song-and-dance-man pose, Fosse was a careful, intelligent reader. His writer friends knew how high Fosse’s own standards were (whether he failed or succeeded, he never set out to manufacture crap) and they often responded to his subtle urgings that they do better. Some writers who worked with him were angry at the end, as he demanded from them what he could more easily demand from a dancer; those who didn’t work with him had easier friendships.

  Yes, Fosse was competitive, and cared (perhaps too much) about the way he stood in relation to other directors. In 1974, after he had his first ferocious heart attack, Gardner and Chayefsky were summoned to Fosse’s hospital room to serve as witnesses to his will. There were two lawyers waiting. Fosse was in critical condition in his bed, silent and trapped in a ganglia of tubes and wires. The lawyers asked the two writers to sign the will; Gardner did so immediately. But Chayefsky insisted on reading the text. He discovered that Fosse hadn’t left him anything, so he turned to the silent Fosse and said: “Fuck you, live!” Fosse started to laugh; all measuring devices began to go wild; the lawyers blanched; a platoon of nurses arrived to save Fosse’s life. Finally, all was calmed down again. Chayefsky resumed reading the will, while Fosse lay silent. Then Paddy came to a provision that reserved $20,000 for a party for Fosse’s friends. Hey, that’s great, Chayefsky said, it’s just what Josh Logan did. For the first time, Fosse spoke.

  “How much did Logan leave for the party?” he said, in a thin weak voice.

  “Twenty thousand,” said Chayefsky.

  “Make mine twenty-five,” said Fosse, falling back, as Chayefsky and Gardner dissolved into laughter. That visit probably saved his life.

  Quite simply, Fosse wanted to be the best at what he did. In that impossibly romantic quest, he drove dancers hard (although never harder than he drove himself) and kept demanding more from his stars. He worked hard at understanding actors, studying with Sanford Meisner, reading the basic texts from Stanislavski to Harold Clurman. And he developed his own ways to get his actors to do their best work.

  “He could act incredibly humble when he wanted something from you,” said Roy Scheider, who believes his own best work was in All That Jazz. “When he met someone he wanted for the first time, he knew everything about you. He’d done research, he’d seen your movies or plays. He’d say, ‘You know, you were very good in that part, hey, wait, you got
a nomination, didn’t you? You won.9 And there’d be a pause, after he did all this praising. And then he’d say how that was nothing compared to what lies ahead in your work with me. And he made you believe it. And then he did it…. After three, four meetings you’d be thoroughly convinced that you were not capable of giving him what he wanted. And then he would begin to build your confidence, making you feel that your reflowering would take place in his show.” Scheider laughed. “You see, for him, it was always being done for posterity. Every time out of the chute, it was for history.”

  Because he worked so hard, and because he knew how much pain was involved in the making of a show or a movie, Fosse generally despised critics. He thought they saw too much and, as a result, their sensibilities were blunted, making them unable to respond to amazing theatrical moments in the way an audience might. They were all too glib, dismissing (or praising) two years of another’s work in a review dashed off in an hour. He thought critics were primarily responsible for the failure of Star 80 (based on Teresa Carpenter’s brilliant article for the Voice); when Big Deal opened to lukewarm reviews last year and then closed after 100-odd performances, he was disheartened.

  “Maybe all they want are Eddie Murphy movies or sets that sing,” he said. “Maybe all they want is shit. Maybe it’s over for people like me.”

  But he was still working at the end; trying to choose between a movie about Walter Winchell, a movie version of Chicago, probably with Madonna, or something completely new. During the summer, we talked a few times about his experiences during the Second World War, when he was a 17-year-old sailor working in an entertainment unit in the South Pacific; he was with the first Americans to enter Japan at the end of the war and was still horrified at the scale of the destruction in Tokyo and the stupidly brutal way so many American soldiers treated the Japanese, particularly the women. “It still makes me sick,” he said. “That was the first time I was really ashamed to be an American.” The contrast between the idealism of fighting the war and the morally corrosive realities of victory was a splendid setup for a Fosse movie, but Fosse was uneasy about it. “That world is gone, that music, the way people were.…Most of the country wouldn’t know what I was talking about.”